Open Transcripts

Page 65 of 107

Discovering Health Innovations in Humanitarian Settings

presented by Kamalini Lokuge

During the war in Afghanistan, the mil­i­tary decid­ed to air drop food pack­ages as part of its win­ning hearts and minds cam­paign. Unfortunately, the food pack­ages were very sim­i­lar in appear­ance to the clus­ter bombs they were drop­ping at the same time. If mil­i­tary decision-makers had spo­ken to com­mu­ni­ties, aid work­ers, mil­i­tary per­son­nel on the ground, they’d have fig­ured out there were smarter ways to deliv­er food and win the trust of the Afghan people.

Kenneth Goldsmith at The Influencers 2016

presented by Kenneth Goldsmith

I think that what I want to say is that the polemics around the dis­course of the Web are too bina­ry. I think that one of the prob­lems that we have in the­o­riz­ing the Web is that we tend to mor­al­ize it in bina­ries. I get it. It’s bad. The Web is bad for you. Or the sort of free cul­ture is always like, ​“It’s real­ly good. It’s great. Free cul­ture is great.” It’s neither.

Feral Urbanism

presented by AbdouMaliq Simone

There seems to be a rush to exceed time, to pro­duce urban envi­ron­ment and social­i­ty for which we have no lan­guage, some­thing that goes beyond spec­u­la­tion, some­thing cut loose from hav­ing to make sense now. The city cut loose from what it had embod­ied or promised.

Evgeny Morozov on Silicon Valley Solutionism

presented by Evgeny Morozov

There is this bias in soci­ety that as long as you have more infor­ma­tion things are auto­mat­i­cal­ly bet­ter because you have more knowl­edge. It’s a bias that goes all the way back to the Enlightenment.

Evgeny Morozov on the Kingdom of Geeks

presented by Evgeny Morozov

There is this very bizarre alliance between world-changing geeks on the one hand and pol­i­cy­mak­ers who only care about out­comes. They no longer care about how those out­comes are arrived at. They have stripped pol­i­tics of all mean­ing. All they want is to get peo­ple to do the right thing. They don’t care why they do it.

The Algorithmic Spiral of Silence

presented by Zeynep Tufekci

A cou­ple of major plat­forms like Facebook and Twitter, YouTube, have become in many places around the world a de fac­to pub­lic sphere. Especially in coun­tries that have less than free Internet, less than free mass media. And these coun­tries have tran­si­tioned from a very con­trolled pub­lic sphere to a commercially-run one like Facebook.

The Ethics of Open Source

presented by Ashe Dryden

This talk is more about the coer­cion of labor into open source soft­ware. So I want to take a crit­i­cal look at how we can engage busi­ness­es and oth­er stake­hold­ers in tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies to begin to cre­ate a more equal and sus­tain­able envi­ron­ment for all peo­ple con­tribut­ing to open source.

Surveillance and Race Online

presented by Simone Browne

[The] ques­tion of what hap­pens when black­ness enters the frame can kind of neat­ly encap­su­late the ways I’ve been think­ing and try­ing to talk about sur­veil­lance for the last few years.

Indie Music and the Web

presented by Maggie Vail

I think it’s deeply impor­tant that we add a work­ing knowl­edge of busi­ness and busi­ness mod­els to what it means to be web-literate. The sites that we use, there’s big mon­ey behind them, and there’s even big­ger prof­it motives in front of them. We need to be able to think crit­i­cal­ly about where we build our com­mu­ni­ties, about what they’re doing with our data, and about when—not if—they mon­e­tize us.

Critical Computing
Using Computers for Social Awareness and Empowerment

presented by Fox Harrell

In the real world we can cre­ative­ly rep­re­sent our­selves in dynam­ic ways. So, we can vary our ges­ture, our dis­course, our pos­ture, our fash­ion, life sto­ries, the way we tell our sto­ries. And all of this is with an astound­ing sen­si­tiv­i­ty to social con­text. Computer tech­nolo­gies like com­put­er games, social net­work­ing, and vir­tu­al worlds are much more prim­i­tive than what we do in the real world.

Page 65 of 107

← Previous

Next →

Common Tags

artificial intelligence Internet Hall of Fame 2014 art technology Internet Internet history ethics Carl Malamud Geek of the Week religion design Twitter open source Internet Hall of Fame Histories of Violence infrastructure community New America education Internet Hall of Fame 2013 politics privacy Berkman Klein Center algorithms surveillance

Some Random Transcripts

The Conversation #65 — Rebecca Solnit
presented by Aengus Anderson, Neil Prendergast, Rebecca Solnit

There's a lot of beautiful things. And I think if there's one thing I'm most deeply disquiet about it's…power. Why are we doing almost nothing about climate change? It's because despite the fact that most people on earth and many government on Earth do, the oil corporations and the governments most closely allied to the oil corporations, notably ours, don't want to do anything. Read more →

The Cellular Basis of Neural Computation
presented by Michael Hausser

Over the past century, we've been to the moon, we've split the atom, we've sequenced the human genome, but were still only at the very beginning of our understanding of the human brain. This is one of the great challenges that we face. If we can understand the brain, we can develop better treatments for brain disorders, we can design better robots, better computers, and ultimately we can better understand ourselves. Read more →

The Conversation #19 — Joseph Tainter
presented by Aengus Anderson, Joseph Tainter, Micah Saul

I see a set of constraints facing us in the future, and they're all going to be very expensive. First is funding retirements for the Baby Boom generation. Second is continuing increases in the costs of healthcare. The third is replacing decaying infrastructure. The fourth is adapting to climate change and repairing environmental damage. The fifth is developing new sources of energy. The sixth is what I see as in all likelihood continuing high military costs. The seventh is the costs of innovation. Read more →

The True Costs of Misinformation
presented by Joan Donovan

Of course we're avid, avid watchers of Tucker Carlson. But insofar as he's like the shit filter, which is that if things make it as far as Tucker Carlson, then they probably have much more like…stuff that we can look at online. And so sometimes he'll start talking about something and we don't really understand where it came from and then when we go back online we can find that there's quite a bit of discourse about "wouldn't it be funny if people believed this about antifa." Read more →